Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get

In the boot (aka trunk for y'all across the sea) of my car there are lots of things that probably don't help me to get the most economical use of my car, but it also means that I don't have to store them indoors. For example Sophia's buggy, my walking boots, a couple of picnic rugs, shopping bags...
There are also a few other more random things, including the orders of service from the last few weddings that we've been to. These include Bekki and HP (now HB)'s weddings. [In case anyone doesn't know, or is unfamiliar with the term an order of service is basically the outline of what will happen in the wedding service and song words, who will do what, etc. It's a lovely way to help people know what's happening on the day, and to look back on afterwards].

I started thinking about the orders of service as I drove over to my mum's house yesterday. We didn't have one for our wedding, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me explain...

They say that women start to dream about the perfect wedding from when they are little girls. Certainly, it's a role play game that little girls are often found playing. I remember our dressing up box with old net curtains being great for making veils and dresses etc. I'm not sure that I exactly ever 'planned out' my wedding ceremony, but I did have certain expectations of it. In my early teens (or even earlier) I was a part of our church's choir. This was a Church of England church, with a set wedding service. If people requested a choir for their ceremony we got to sit up in the choir stalls to sing, and got paid for it. That seemed like easy money to me! But anyway, the point is that I got used to hearing the Church of England wedding ceremony, and can still quote back lines from it.

HB and her Steve did get married in that church, they had the traditional wedding service and I enjoyed the chance to be a part of their wonderful day. I was the 'pregnant bridesmaid' on that occasion. But for Menard and myself we decided that rather than get married there, in my local parish church, we wanted to be married in our own church - Jubilee Church. This has what you might call a less traditional typical Sunday service, and consequently our wedding was less traditional than HB's.

We got married in a cinema! How many people can say that?! And who would ever dream of that from an early age (although some of the current young folk in our chuch may!) We didn't have the traditional wording for the vows. We did choose a couple of the songs, but I can't actually remember what they were. As proof of that, someone in my family said to me a while back "we sang this at your wedding" and I said "did we?!". We didn't have an order of sevice for people to read on the day and keep if they so wanted to. We actually had to additionally have a registry office ceremony as the legal obligations of the marriage ceremony could not be fulfilled in the cimema at that time. In many ways it was entirely different to what I would have expected of my wedding.

But I'm so glad that our wedding was different. In a way it prepared me for the fact that marriage itself was in many ways entirely different from what I'd been expecting. Oh, it's not a bad thing. I love being married. I'm just not sure I really understood what getting married would mean in the long term. Having a wedding is one day, a marriage lasts a lifetime. I love Menard with all my heart, and I hope and pray that this is 'until death we part'. But it's entirely different to some of my expectations.

(I will be blogging more about this soon)